According to a Paris Review article:
'The British novelist Olivia Manning spent her dogged, embittered career longing, largely in vain, for literary glory and a secure place in the English canon. ...[E]ven the modest ambition of a solo review in a Sunday newspaper proved elusive, a snub that especially chafed whenever her archnemesis, Iris Murdoch, released a new novel to lavish coverage in the broadsheets. Manning was baffled by the praise heaped on the younger writer, whose novels she derided as “intellectual exercises.” Her own drew directly from real events and aimed to be “pieces of life,” which she saw as the proper purpose of literature.
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'In 1974, vindication hovered into view. Manning’s tenth novel, The Rain Forest, was “called in” by the Booker Prize judges. She was then sixty-six; her serious-writer credentials had been established in the previous decade by The Balkan Trilogy, based on her experiences living in wartime Bucharest and Athens ...[In] the end, however, The Rain Forest failed to make the cut.... In Manning’s perception, it was business as usual: the snobby Oxbridge-dominated publishing elite had closed ranks against her.
'Manning’s humble background and lack of a university education always made her feel at a disadvantage. Born in the seaside town of Portsmouth to a genial, womanizing naval officer and his younger wife, a domineering publican’s daughter from the north of Ireland, Manning was steeped in dysfunction from an early age (like so many brilliant writers)… I can remember being very surprised to find that other people were happy at home, to find that other girls confided in their mothers and were fond of them.”
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'Manning herself was twenty-six when she moved to London in 1934 (though she always shaved a few years off her age), having found a job as a delivery typist at Peter Jones, the genteel Chelsea department store.... Manning wrote prolifically, read widely, and did her best to forge useful connections from scratch. ...
'The dedication paid off....[W]hile Jonathan Cape rejected two novel manuscripts, an editor there, Hamish Miles, sent encouraging words and subsequently became Manning’s friend, lover, and impeccably connected entrée to the Bloomsbury milieu of her long-cherished dreams.
'Oxford-educated, charming, and urbane, Miles was also forty and married. Still, their relationship changed Manning’s life. He nurtured her talent, took her to Paris (where he bought her a white leather-bound copy of Ulysses from Shakespeare and Company), and introduced her to the poet Stevie Smith, a kindred spirit who became a lifelong friend. Crucially, he was instrumental in the publication of Manning’s well-received debut novel, The Wind Changes, which came out from Jonathan Cape in April 1937.
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'Claire Tomalin, in her Observer review of The Play Room, identified “a theme that runs through almost all of Olivia Manning’s work: it is that of the child or young woman who seeks for and needs love and is never given quite enough.” ...
'The father character in The Play Room is closely based on Manning’s own father, who was kind, generous, irresponsible, and philandering in equal measure. As a child, she adored him, and she would eventually marry a man cut from the same cloth. In 1939, eighteen months after the death of Miles, Manning met Reggie Smith. A working-class grammar-school boy from Birmingham, he was tall and handsome, hard-drinking and gregarious. In less than two months, they got married. Manning gave the registrar a date of birth that made her twenty-eight; she was in fact thirty-one. Smith was twenty-five. The marriage was a success overall, despite his cheerful promiscuity. “Are you interested in extramarital fun?” was his indiscriminate gambit at parties. But his faith in Manning’s talent was unwavering, as was his patience with her self-obsessed grumbling. And she, too, had affairs.
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'....Her final years did bring some validation: The Danger Tree, the first Levant Trilogy volume, was named the Yorkshire Post’s Best Novel of 1977. The award was worth two hundred fifty pounds—a hundred pounds less than for nonfiction, she groused to the long-suffering Smith...
'Seven years after her death in 1980 at age seventy-two, the BBC aired Fortunes of War, a faithful seven-part adaptation of the Balkan Trilogy and the Levant Trilogy. Starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh and featuring multiple international locations, the series had the highest budget in BBC history. Masterpiece Theatre’s broadcast of the show in the U.S. prompted the New York Times to call Manning “the only English woman novelist to have painted a broad, compassionate and witty canvas of men and women at war that invites comparison with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh.”'
In another article we discover about--
'....[Olivia] Manning’s ... mysticism and her love of cats.'
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